Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left

Duberman (A Saving Remnant, 2011) is the author of several well-received recent biographies of key 1960s radicals. Narrating the life of radical scholar-activist Howard Zinn, he confronts a challenge: how to present a three-dimensional portrait of a complicated and polarizing figure who only wanted history to know his public-facing side? (Zinn destroyed his personal archives before his death.) The result is a biography that does its best to understand Zinn’s personal motivations and sometimes messy interpersonal relationships while remaining necessarily focused on Zinn’s larger-than life public presence, particularly his civil rights activism, his bitter feuds with university administrators, and the merits of his best-known work, ‘A People’s History of the United States’. Although generally sympathetic, emphasizing his subject’s empathy and concern for the disadvantaged, Duberman’s account is not uncritical; at several points, he reminds readers of Zinn’s shortcomings on the issue of gay rights, and he presents a critique, from the Left, of the limits of Zinn’s polemical thinking. Zinn’s celebrity, and the popularity of A People’s History, will drive interest in this selection.